Fear mobile malware posted 1 September 2009 | Markus Jakobsson    view bio

Online criminals have many tools for committing fraud and theft, including phishing and, increasingly, malware. A more acute problem is mobile malware, which will pose a serious threat to mobile communications as smartphone use explodes. The inherent limitations of smartphones – power, memory, bandwidth – make most anti-virus tools unsuitable once the rate of malware instances reaches a certain threshold, because smartphones can’t handle the updates that PCs currently have to. So what happens when malware authors start developing viruses for smartphones at the rate they currently do for personal computers? We may not have to wait long to find out, because mobile platforms are rich with data and are convenient payment platforms ripe for defrauding. We must find better solutions before it’s too late. And we can’t use current strategies to combat the problem, because the mobile context is so much more vulnerable and resource-constrained.

comments (2) tags: malware, mobile devices & interfaces, mobile security, phishing, technology trends posted in security & privacy

Experimenting on Mechanical Turk: 5 How Tos posted 21 July 2009 | Markus Jakobsson    view bio

Performing human-subjects experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk offers many benefits, including very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error…

comments (6) tags: crowdsourcing, Mechanical Turk, phishing, research methodology, science 2.0, usable security posted in ethnography, our culture & processes, security & privacy